Honest question. Do you think the GNOME project is as healthy today as it was, say, 4 years ago? Benjamin Otte explains that no, it isn't. GNOME lacks developers, goals, mindshare and users. The situation as he describes it, is a lot more dire than I personally thought.

I also liked the design ideology that one Gnome application did only one thing and it did it well.

Putting aside the delusions of the other reply to your post (because no, *nix didn't manage to stay very true to its original philosophy; we even had an news piece about it not a long time ago http://www.osnews.com/story/26000/Unix_doesn_t_follow_the_Unix_phil... ) - LXDE (and the applications it ships with & ~promotes) mostly manages to stay like that, so far.